Mobile computing devices, such as laptop computers, tablet computers, netbook computers, or other such devices, often implement a number of power management techniques in order to reduce the amount of power consumed by those devices, so as to prolong battery life between charges. In some approaches, such techniques may be used only when the device is operating on battery power, or, in other approaches, may be used regardless of the power source being used (e.g., battery or AC power). Common power management techniques include performing a screen dimming operation for a display panel of a computing device, turning off the screen and/or performing a system suspend operation, where current operating information for a computing device is saved to random access memory (RAM) or to disk (e.g., a hard drive or flash drive) and the computing device is then placed in a very low power operating state.
Such power management techniques may be performed by a computing device when the computing device detects that it has not received any user input (e.g., keyboard or pointing device input) in a specific period of time and has not been explicitly instructed by an interface of an application running on the system to not perform power management activities. For example, a computing device may first dim a computing device's screen after a period of time, and then, sometime later, turn off the screen, and then, sometime even later, perform a system suspend operation, such as those described above, and remain in the suspend state until the user interacts with the computing device by, for example, opening a display, entering a keystroke, using the pointing device or engaging a power switch, as some examples.
When a computing device is suspended to RAM or disk, the operating state of the device remains static. For example, the computing device, when suspended, does not request or receive updated information for applications running on the computing device at the time it was suspended, such as emails, instant messages or voicemails, for example. The computing device also does not install any operating system and/or security related updates when it is suspended. When a user interacts with the suspended computing device, the computing device will resume normal operation and then request and receive information used to update the operating state of the computing device, such as, for example, emails, instant messages and voicemails sent to the user since the computing device entered the suspend state, pending operating system and security related updates, among a number of other items. Such an approach may detract from the user's experience, however, as the user has to wait for such updates to complete after interacting with the system before the computing system's operating state is current. Furthermore, the resources of the computing system may be heavily utilized during such updates, thus impacting performance of the computing system during the updates.